Bio
Andrew Schneider is the Atmospherics Lead at Guerrilla in Amsterdam. He spends his time developing the tools and technology behind the Nubis real-time volumetric cloud system for the Horizon Franchise Games. Previously, he worked as a Senior FX Technical Director at Blue Sky Studios, where he developed the volumetrics and clouds pipelines for the Rio and Ice Age animated movies. His interests include visual effects, simulation, lighting, and volumetrics - but specifically how to engineer realistic and efficient solutions for these disciplines. He has previously given 5 Talks at SIGGRAPH from 2011 to 2017, one talk at Eurographics 2018, one GDC talk in 2022, and published a chapter about rendering real-time volumetric clouds for games in GPU Pro 7.
Description
Real-Time volumetric clouds in games have seen broadening adoption over the past several years. Many of the new applications use systems based on or similar to our approach, Nubis, which was introduced in 2015 in the Advances in Real-Time Rendering course. Nubis could produce a variety of cloud types in various lighting conditions for use in dynamic volumetric skyboxes that could render in under two milliseconds on the PlayStation 4 for the game, Horizon Zero Dawn. With the arrival of the new PlayStation 5 hardware and the sequel title, Horizon Forbidden West, we were able to push Nubis further into the game experience. In addition to improving our rendering approach for volumetric cloudscapes for use in skies, we started to use volumetric clouds to create environments such as clouds that the player could fly through. Additionally, we began to use them as VFX elements such as fast spinning superstorms with internal lighting flashes. In order to extend Nubis in these directions, several open problems in real-time volumetric cloud rendering had to be mitigated or solved. Rendering cloud environments up close, especially flying through them, can easily become computationally expensive. We will present a new cloud modeling and rendering approach that delivers performant and detailed results at 1080p resolution without the use of temporal upscaling. VisualFX are often synonymous with speed and lighting effects – two things that temporally upscaled clouds on a budget cannot do easily. We will present a way to mitigate temporal artifacts in fast-moving clouds and a near zero cost method to add internal lighting effects to clouds. Finally, we will explain how these three approaches are integrated and unified into the new Nubis Cloud System. As a bonus, we will offer a look at some future work.